It’s week two of budget black-hole gate. When will it all end? Probably after the May elections

Good times for Britain when the chancellor is saved by the Office for Budget Responsibility being slightly more inept than her at a single convenient moment. Following the accidental early publication of the fiscal watchdog’s market-sensitive budget document, chair Richard Hughes has now fallen on his sword. Although it’s possible he meant to fall on his feet but just mistimed it. On Monday we discovered that the OBR’s website is not securely hosted but was built using WordPress. Oh man. That’s definitely budget, but is it responsible? It may as well just have had a Tumblr.

This series of unfortunate events meant the OBR bigwigs were a man down when they appeared before the Treasury select committee this morning, butching out the decision to go to war with Rachel Reeves by releasing their draft economic assessments in the weeks leading up to the budget. Did the chancellor seriously mislead the country about the state of the public finances? That is the £4.2bn question. Are our problems going to turn out to be a whole lot bigger than something that could be addressed with £4.2bn? The answer to that is regrettably too obvious too state.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

A flock of Father Christmases share the seasonal songs that capture the magic, merriment and occasional heartbreak that comes with donning the red suit

My father was a Santa and my wife got me into doing it. It’s the best thing I ever did. I do schools, universities, supermarkets, Christmas lights switch-ons … As soon as Santa comes along, everybody melts. One little girl brought her guinea pig, who leapt off her hand and dived straight into my Santa beard. The parents were in stitches while we tried to get him out. My favourite Christmas songs are Eartha Kitt’s sultry version of Santa Baby, because it gets all the adults in the mood to get up and have a boogie with Santa, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, because the lyrics are so pure. No Christmas songs drive me mad. It’s Christmas: they’re all great. Paul Fessi

Anthropic’s chief scientist says AI autonomy could spark a beneficial ‘intelligence explosion’ – or be the moment humans lose control

Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world’s leading AI scientists has said.

Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.

As the Xbox 360 turns 20, we celebrate its most influential and memorable games – both exclusives, and those that came to the console first

Originally featured as a minigame in Project Gotham, this 80s-style twin-stick shooter was rebuilt as a standalone digital-only release, attracting a huge new fanbase. Fast, frenetic and super stylish, with lovely vector visuals, it was the game that first showed the potential of Xbox Live Arcade.

The use of ‘nudify’ apps is becoming more and more prevalent, with hundreds of teachers having seen images created by pupils, often of their peers. The fallout is huge – and growing fast

‘It worries me that it’s so normalised. He obviously wasn’t hiding it. He didn’t feel this was something he shouldn’t be doing. It was in the open and people saw it. That’s what was quite shocking.”

A headteacher is describing how a teenage boy, sitting on a bus on his way home from school, casually pulled out his phone, selected a picture from social media of a girl at a neighbouring school and used a “nudifying” app to doctor her image.

Max Rushden is joined by Geoff Lemon, Emma John and Sam Perry to preview the second Test, a day-night affair at the Gabba, with England looking to recover from their embarrassing defeat in Perth

Condemnation of system that ‘allows officers to simply walk away, retiring without consequence’

• Full report: 12 police officers would have faced gross misconduct cases

• Timeline: decades seeking justice and change

Margaret Aspinall, whose 18-year-old son James was one of the 97 people unlawfully killed, has criticised the lack of accountability.

I cannot accept or understand how 97 people can be unlawfully killed, the police can lie, and nobody is held accountable,” she says.

“I recognise that the IOPC and Operation Resolve have worked hard and some of these findings are strong. But it’s absolutely ridiculous that so few people have been accused of gross misconduct for the lies and cover-up we’ve had to fight for 36 years.”

Official report says forces in England and Wales yet to implement policies for investigation

A quarter of police forces in England and Wales are yet to implement “basic policies for investigating sexual offences”, an official report has found, with women still being failed despite promises of change after the murder of Sarah Everard four years ago.

The report by Dame Elish Angiolini follows an inquiry set up after Everard was murdered by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021. She was abducted off a London street while walking home.

An 18-month battle, now in its endgame, has left the strategically important Ukrainian city in ruins

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest news updates

For a time Pokrovsk was a haven, a wartime Ukrainian boom city because of its strategic position in the east, 30 miles (48km) from the front. But that was before the summer of 2024, when a rapid Russian advance engulfed the industrial centre in a shattering conflict, a duel only now reaching its endgame.

The 18-month battle for Pokrovsk epitomises the current state of the Ukraine war: an attritional struggle in which gradual Russian advances have been made at extraordinary human cost. Though it demonstrates Russia cannot easily capture urban areas, the fight has also drained Ukraine, and consequences are emerging elsewhere.

Justice secretary expected to pull back from plans to reserve jury trials from only the most serious cases

The former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner will lay an amendment on Wednesday to speed up the workers rights’ bill, after “considerable anger” that unelected Lords forced the watering down of day-one rights, Jessica Elgot and Pippa Crerar report.

Twelve more prisoners have been mistakenly freed in the past month and two are still at large, David Lammy has said.

I’m not going to give details of those cases, because these are operational decisions made by the police, and you’ll understand if they’re about to arrest somebody they don’t want me to blow the cover.